'The man in black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed'

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There have been plenty of success stories on
the iPhone...sometimes you miss one.

I didn't know much about Digital Chocolate before sitting down
with Electronic Arts founder-turned-mobile mogul and Digital
Chocolate CEO Trip Hawkins in the lobby of San Francisco's downtown
Marriott hotel, just outside the busy Game Developers Conference.

But it's impossible to ignore their success: last month, the
company announced they'd reached eight million downloads since
supporting iPhone in December.

Digital Chocolate's games include Crazy Penguin Catapult, Tower Bloxx Deluxe, 3D
Brick Breaker Revolution, Chocolate Shop Frenzy and Diamond Islands.
Hawkins claims his games made up 2% of total app downloads on iPhone
and iPod Touch since December.

"I'll tell you the formula," he explained. "The answer
is a math formula. Quality X originality X ubiquity / file size and
development costs. That's our winning formula. I can't speak for
everybody else's winning formula, but that's why it's working for us."

Most of his company's products are original properties. While some
publishers, like his former company Electronic Arts, are finding
success lending their established franchises to iPhone versions,
Digital Chocolate's focus remains on original creations, though they
do produce occasional licensed games, such as the recent 24:
Mobile Ops. It's a move Hawkins picked up from Pixar, a philosophy
focused on in-house development.

"We focus on our employees doing it," he said, "We're
producing all original content for the most part. Pixar does that.
Pixar doesn't license a comic book character or book brand, they
create their own character brands. We do the same thing."

Hawkins is excited about what his company can do with iPhone's
pending 3.0 operating system update coming to consumers this summer.
The addition of push notifications and downloadable content are on
the forefront of his mind. And while he's happy with the feature
additions Apple is making, even a heavy-hitter like Digital
Chocolate isn't immune to common developer grips, such as user
reviews tending to focus on assigning either five or one star
ratings and nothing else.

"We're closing in on 300,000 reviews. I'll tell you my
favorite review that I ever saw was a guy who said 'this game is
really good, but it's nowhere near as entertaining as reading these
reviews,'" he laughed. "There are actually four things going
on with the one-point ratings."

One, he points out, is most people don't know how to
move from the default rating. They don't even know you can change
the rating. "So you have all these rave reviews that gave it
one star," he said.

Two, some people just like to cause controversy and
stir up negativity. "Some users that just enjoy hating and
having fun with it and being kind of controversial," he
said. "They're almost looking for something not to like."

Three, users tend to review based on a gut reaction
and assign unnecessary blame. "Okay, so fine it [our game]
crashed the phone a couple of times," he said, "and
they're blaming the app when maybe the operating system [is to
blame] and maybe that could reduce the score, but from a 5 to a 1?
Is that fair?"

Four, maybe the product just wasn't for them. Instead
of recognizing that, they might slap the game with a low score.
"If I'm a jazz fan and you're a heavy metal fan, well if you
don't like heavy metal, you're going to think it's a one-star
song," he sighed.

Hawkins' third point, iPhone memory management, is a touchy issue for
him. One of Digital Chocolate's games, Tower Bloxx, has seen
critical user reviews because some users have experienced repeated
device crashes while trying to play the game. It's since been patched,
Hawkins said, but Digital Chocolate faces the same issue other iPhone
developers do: not everyone actively updates their games.

"The memory management on the iPhone is challenged," he
said. "As an iPhone user -- you get your memory pretty messed up
after a while [of us] and then anything of any size is going to push
it over the edge. We're actually in the process of implementing our
own memory management solutions to fix it."

Digital Chocolate is happy on the iPhone, though. They're producing
all game content in-house, though, the opposite approach to another
iPhone success story, ngmoco:), developer of Rolando, Dropship, Dr. Awesome and others.
Hawkins acknowledges the triumphs of competition, attributing it
to another possible winning formula in a new marketplace. But
there's room for everyone, he said, if they're looking at the big picture.

"The iPhone is an archetype," he said. "It's a
watershed event, it's representative of some much bigger trends that
are a much bigger deal than the iPhone and the effect on the industry
is going to be much greater than just what Apple does. One way that I
frame it…I call it the omnimedia revolution. Omni means all. We
now have for the very first time ever have interactive digital media
that's being used by everybody."

You'll be hearing more from Hawkins and Digital Chocolate this year,
too. In addition to rolling out more iPhone games, Digital Chocolate
will be bringing some of their games to other platforms. Tower Bloxx
is already playable on Google's Android platform and, according to
Hawkins, they're going to be embracing every other similar device with
their products.

Sega's iPhone port, based on the Wii game Super Monkey Ball: Banana
Blitz, immediately validated the iPhone as a gaming platform for a
many gamers and developers, but it wasn't a perfect project, as Sega
producer (and former EGM writer) Ethan Einhorn explained during a Game
Developers Conference post mortem session today.

1. Listen to feedback, respond quickly "Getting that user feedback is tremendously helpful from the
standpoint of giving the people exactly the kind of gameplay
experience that they want."

2. Don't play price wars "It was a little tough to see our ranking go down and down.
You always want to be number one, but we resisted the temptation to
drop price prematurely. For us, that was a huge benefit down the road
because when we suddenly hit the holidays, we saw a significant boost
in where we were sitting in the top 50."

3. Consider the pros / cons of "Lite" versions "If you're in a position where you've been fortunate enough
to get a lot of very positive reviews and you have a concept that's
easy for people to understand in the description and some screen
shots, I'd say you may want to think twice before putting a lite
version up."

4. Many of your users will be new to the property "A surprising number f people who will play your game, even
if it's based on a well-recognized console IP, will be totally
unfamiliar with it. The iPhone audience is very different from a
traditional game audience."

5. User reviews are king "So many of the consumers are looking straight at what the
user reviews are to determine whether they should buy a game."

6. Don't make it too hard "Despite the efforts we made to make it a user friendly,
very easy experience, for many it was too hard."

7. Build to the device "It was the key to making sure we were making as broad an
audience as possible because all you needed to do was see the video
… to get a sense of exactly what this experience was going to be."

8. Make sure consumers "get it" in 10 seconds "With the iPhone audience, it's a grazing audience that
quickly turn to any number of free or very inexpensive dollar
applications that are right there on the app store."

9. Keep things simple "We chose not to go that direction [the more complicated
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz onWii] when we chose what to do with
Monkey Ball on iPhone. Quite the opposite-- no bosses, no jumping,
just tilting."

10. Consider the play environment "Bite sized gameplay is obviously a major thing to think
about when you're working on the iPhone but something as simple as
save and when you can do it is really, really key to work out in
advance. We made a critical mistake at the launch of the game by
making players have to complete 10 before they could save."